Robert Campbell Moberly [q.v.]. His first books, The Authorship and Historical Character of the Fourth Gospel (1872) and The Gospels in the Second Century (1876), already foreshadowed his mature method. He early evolved for himself a scheme of his life's work, proceeding by graduated stages through the ‘lower’ or textual criticism of the New Testament to the ‘higher’ or historical criticism, and so finally to a conception of the result as a whole. Under the first head falls his epoch-making claim for the close examination of the primitive Western authorities for the text, put forward in his Portions of the Gospels according to St. Mark and St. Matthew from the Bobbio MS. (1886) and in his Novum Testamentum S. Irenaei (posthumously published in 1923). The second of these works was produced in conjunction with one of the seminars of graduates meeting fortnightly during term, which he, as professor, had instituted. In some sense the Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1895), written in collaboration with Dr. A. C. Headlam, admirable in many ways as it is, meant an interruption to his central purpose, prompted by the feeling that a professor of exegesis should publish something exegetical.
Sanday wanted, at least from the time that he became Margaret professor, to concentrate his energies on writing a Life of Christ, and his later books are all of the nature of preliminary studies for the magnum opus, which in fact was never written and, so far as actual manuscript went, never even begun. Thus, he published successively Outlines of the Life of Christ (1905, reprinted from Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible), Sacred Sites of the Gospels (1903), Criticism of the Fourth Gospel (1905), The Life of Christ in Recent Research (1907), Christologies Ancient and Modern (1910), Personality in Christ and in Ourselves (1911), and in conjunction with his seminar, Oxford Studies in the Synoptic Problem (1911); books not all of equal value, but constituting in their sum a sustained effort to look at his subject from every side. Similarly, his later courses of professorial lectures illustrated his conception of the ‘praeparatio evangelica’ as rooted in the history of religion in the East, and not among the Jews only, far back in the centuries before Christ. As the result of advancing years, the pressure of controversy, and the distraction of the War, the magnum opus was practically dropped. His theological position as a modernist, advanced at some points, conservative at others, Sanday did not reach till 1912, and then for a time the scholar was merged in the controversialist (Bishop Gore's Challenge to Criticism, 1914; Spirit, Matter, and Miracle, privately printed, 1916; Form and Content in Christian Tradition, a friendly discussion [with the Rev. N. P. Williams], 1916, &c.). Just at first there may have been something a little impetuous or a little pontifical in his polemic: it was difficult for him to understand how people who adopted his conclusions on critical problems did not necessarily adopt the theological conclusions which had now become to him no less certain. With the outbreak of the War his activities found another vent. His political cast of mind was rather conservative (just as in his economic views he stood up for the middle classes), and the fighting services always had a curious fascination for him. So he threw himself with ardour into the business of a pamphleteer (The Deeper Causes of the War, 1914; The Meaning of the War for Germany and Great Britain: an attempted synthesis, 1915; In View of the End: a retrospect and a prospect, 1916; When should the War end?, 1917). Possibly he turned to these questions with relief because theological controversy was no longer congenial to him. At any rate his instinct for positive statement reasserted itself in a simple but finished summary of the results, as he saw them, of the critical study of the Gospels, The New Testament Background (1918).
Sanday held a unique position among English theological critics as the interpreter par excellence to Englishmen of the immense labour that was being devoted to the New Testament abroad. His best and most characteristic work was perhaps contained in the Life of Christ in Recent Research, which sketched the rise of the eschatological school of interpretation of the Gospels. He was acquainted with some of the most influential scholars abroad. His ideals were in some respects of a German rather than of an English type: he was wont to lament that Englishmen produced so much less that was conceived on an encyclopaedic scale than did the Germans. For many years he read almost everything that was written on his subject in German or English; over nine hundred bound volumes of pamphlets, given to the library of Queen's College, Oxford, attest his assiduity. And he not only read; he digested. He passed through the crucible of his own sane and cautious temper the whole voluminous mass, and criticized the critics. His was not in the strict sense
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